Definitely

Crane didn't tell you why he was seething, why he sat with his shoulders hunched by the kitchen table, staring at the slice of blue skies visible through the gap he'd left when he'd boarded the place up. He'd not even said Hello, just looked at you with a deep seated scowl before he'd settled himself by the table. He'd also looked a little guilty, you'd thought.

Guilty about what?

What he'd definitely not done was walk up to you and kiss you, and you told yourself that was okay. It was definitely not something you'd expected, let alone looked forward to ever since he'd vanished the past five days.

Yeah. Right. You're not a very good liar, are you?

You wandered over to the table and sat down across of him. He clutched a yellow satellite phone in his right hand. That was new. Not literally; the thing looked all sorts of beaten up, with a cracked screen and the buttons worn and fading, but you'd not seen him with it before. The radio, that was old news, and he still carried that too, neatly holstered on his hip.

You sat quietly for a while and tried to look at your hands rather than stare at him, but that didn't work out for very long. So eventually you lifted your eyes. Whatever he'd been up to, it made him look worse for wear. You frowned. Was that blood just below his left shoulder? A dot of red blossomed on the dirty light purple shirt.

"You're bleeding," you told him, echoing his own words so many days ago. Half an eternity at this point, far as you were concerned.

Crane's light brown eyes cut to you. "Yeah. Nothing new there." His voice sounded a little worn. Like he'd been shouting. A lot.

"Do you want me to take a look?" After all, you'd learned quite a bit from watching him clean and treat your wounds. It was the least you could do.

"It's fine," Crane said. But he'd lost some of his frown and was looking at you with something gentle budding behind the solemn glance.

You licked your lips, uncertain if that meant you should just leave him be. His eyes darted to your mouth and he blinked. Again his scowl took a hit.

You made up your mind, pushed back your chair, and stepped around the table to him. He tracked your movements with his left brow quirked curiously and sat up straight when you reached him.

With courage that you hadn't realised you had— and your heart beating a little too fast for your own liking -you stepped behind his chair, grabbed the sides of his shirt, and gave it a hesitating tug. How did one do that again? Were you supposed to just drag it right up, or hitch it skywards slowly? Your fingers twitched and your hands trembled and a lovely jitter wormed its way into your stomach.

"Need help?"

Your teeth clicked together when he grabbed your hands and yanked them and his shirt right over his head.

You stared at the shirt in your hands, and then you felt something warm and solid knock into your chest. You turned your eyes down. Crane looked up at you, the back of his head resting on the mounds of your breasts.

There really wasn't much left of the scowl now, in fact you could see a hint of that rueful little smile again. Not altogether prominent, but getting there.

Your neck and cheek and ears lit themselves on fire, but you tried to hold his heavy stare anyway.

"Thank-you," you mumbled.

"Huh?" He tilted his head. Slightly. Your toes curled. "What for?"

Did he really have to do that? You swallowed and bit down on the tip of your tongue to keep yourself distracted from the warmth coiling in your abdomen.

"For coming back," you clarified while you rallied your courage and tried to get a look over his shoulder at the wound you'd expected there. It was bandaged up, with a patch of red where blood had soaked through. So he'd gotten himself fixed up already. Good. Never mind that you felt a little useless now. And just a smidgen of stupid. You let your left hand drop to the white gauze fixed to him with medical tape, and rested your right atop his shoulder.

Your fingers traced the bandage before skipping to his skin, and only once you'd traced a careful line over the ridge of his shoulder did you notice he'd closed his eyes. And that he'd grabbed his shirt from your right hand and dragged it onto his lap.

You placed your palms against the stiff muscle stretching from his neck down across his shoulders. He pulled in a lungful of air and tilted his head again. You thought that was not fair, how he'd made himself comfortable between your breasts like it was the most natural thing to do. Then he exhaled slowly and rolled his shoulders against your hands. Was he trying to give you a hint? You felt the muscle knot and pull against your palm, stretched taut beneath his warm, soft skin. That was one tense man, you thought, and your fingers agreed as they slid forward and down. Your thumb barely managed to push down into the tight mess, but you tried anyway, and after a minute of working along the slope of his shoulders you seemed to be making some sort of progress.

He let out a grunt once in awhile, in-between his slow, steady breathing, but he kept his eyes closed and didn't seem to mind as you kneaded your way down along his spine.

When you couldn't reach any further down without taking a step back, you did so only reluctantly. His head tilted into his neck when the support of your chest wandered away and Crane cracked his eyes open to glance at you. There. That smile again, laced with a bit of disappointment. He tilted his chin forward, and you missed the warmth.

But you weren't done yet, and you were beginning to think he was enjoying the attention to his sore muscles.

They were pulled together in tense cords wherever you touched him. He was also still very bruised, and you remembered what he'd looked like when you'd seen him fifteen days ago inside the minaret tower. When you'd thought he'd rolled over a peacock. He seemed a little less colourful now, but you still tried to avoid the dark patches of lesions under his skin, lifted the pressure when you reached them and slid your palms gently along the swollen skin.

You were getting fairly close to the rim of his jeans as the moments ticked by, so you worked your way back up, until your fingers once again curled against the base of his neck.

He'd not moved for a while, and while you looked at the crown of his head you wondered if he'd fallen asleep. You didn't know if that'd have been a compliment or an insult.

But Crane was still very much awake. When you'd stopped your woeful attempt at a massage and had run out of ideas, he went ahead pushed his chair back and got to his feet. You watched him move about and remembered with a sudden jolt that you'd taken his shirt off. That detail had slipped your mind while you'd been so focused on the technicalities of what to do with his muscles.

It was difficult not to notice now though. Even more so when he grabbed your hand and turned you around with him, moving you up against the table while he enclosed you in a cage made of a pair of arms.

Crane stared down at you, the rueful smile long gone, replaced by something that suffocated your thoughts. His hand hitched up, slid underneath your shirt.

He'd touched you before. Had seen you with nothing but your failing dignity dressing you, and he'd been a stoic gentleman through the whole ordeal. Not once had you noticed his eyes wandering or his hands going places they didn't have to be at. He'd been gentle then, too. Tender.

This was different.

Same set of hands. Same, calloused fingers pressing into your skin. Same man attached to them, but with longing written across his features rather than concern. A constrained, tied up longing and he was just as much fighting it as he was letting it dictate his next move. Crane fastened his grip around your hip, and with one effortless pull he lifted you off your feet and sat you down on the table.

You leaned away from him at first, away from the wall of man that had built himself up in front of you. He didn't come after you, even took a slow shuffling step back. Not out of reach, no. He kept his hands on your hips and his eyes on you. Waiting. Thinking. Over-thinking. Some painful, hungry thing churned behind his eyes. Yes. No. Maybe.

Maybe?

You must have given him some signal, some wordless come hither of sorts, because his thighs bumped into the table and he moved up. A hand slipped out from under your shirt and he placed his fingers against the small of your back. They started trekking their way upwards along your spine, tapping out another one of those curious rhythms that you couldn't place.. Though this one came across a bit demanding with a lot of expectation wrapped into it, and you felt your body deciding to make the best of it. Yes. No. Maybe? You arched your back into the touch, and with every tap he pulled you up a little more. God, couldn't he stop looking at you at least? You felt squashed on the spot, reduced to a warm little puddle that wanted to ooze off the table and drip through a crack somewhere.

You shivered. Your arms relaxed when his fingers finally tickled up your hairline and he lifted you close enough to fit his lips on yours.

Maybe. No. Yes. Your thoughts went on the fritz, senses crowded by him and leaving no room for reason. His scent in each pull of air. His hands, exploring everything they'd come across before with newfound curiosity. Every flick of his thumbs. Each finger dragging across your skin. His lips. Warm. Greedy. The teasing tip of his tongue darting in and out, like it couldn't make up his mind. A graze of teeth. A shy rumble somewhere in front of you.

Then he abandoned the kiss, let his mouth dip to your neck and you heard his breath hitch desperately in his throat.

One hand roamed along your hip, down your thigh. It curled into your knee. Tightened. Pulled. You were snapped forward, slid across the table. Your pelvis knocked into his. Heat lanced straight through you, fierce and to the point. Maybe. No. Yes. Maybe.

No.

Your eyes fluttered opened— when had you closed them again? —and every muscle in you tensed with a sudden need for restraint. The fingers threading through his hair— when had they gotten there? —tightened. Your legs, looped around his hip— 'Oh.' —squeezed a little.

You held your breath, snuck your free hand between the two of you, and placed it firmly against his chest.

He froze.

And then the both of you almost jumped out of your respective skins when the radio strapped to his belt came alive with a burst of static.

His hand at the back of your head fell away and Crane jerked up like a spooked meerkat. A meerkat with a pained expression plastered over his face, all confusion and desperation and a decent serving of shame. The shame brought a sheepish little grin to his lips when he looked at you, but then the grin faded when a woman's voice echoed from the radio.

"Crane?"

He closed his eyes. His jaw flexed. "What-the-fucking-hell-now…" he whispered. It took him a moment before he lifted the radio free and clicked it on.

"Yeah— yeah— What's up, Troy?"

Troy? You'd heard that name before. She ran the Embers. He knew the Embers? You wiggled a little as you sat there with your legs still left and right of his hips. In response his fingers curled into your shirt, like he was trying to say Please don't go anywhere, while you heard the woman on the radio tell him that they seemed to have a bit of a situation and they'd really appreciate if he could come back. Now.

Crane's eyes cut up at you, and then took a hike down the length of you until they stopped right where he'd bumped his pelvis into yours.

"Yeah. Me too. Sort of," he told the radio and his lips curled into a lopsided smirk.

A rowdy giggle made it halfway up your throat before he planted a finger on your lips and winked at you. Your giggle turned to a desperate wheezing chortle. Positively mortified you squeezed your eyes shut and tried to wait it all out. All of it. The confusion, the maniac laughter wanting out, and that traitorous heat in your stomach.

This was bizarre. You'd just almost gotten yourself nailed on a kitchen table by the man you'd tried to kill a little more than two weeks ago. Kill. You. You had tried to kill someone, and now he was—

"Okay, I'll be there in—" Leaving? Your eyes opened and you frowned at him as he seemed to think something over. "— half an hour."

No. He couldn't leave again. Not after he'd been gone for so long, had you worried sick and lonely. Whatever manic laughter had wanted out a moment earlier quickly died a bloody death as it fell victim to a spell of panic.

Crane clicked off the radio.

"How's your ankle?" He took a slow step away from the table. From you.

You tried to smile and sat up, tried to follow the warmth he'd just taken away from you. "Much better."

"Great." He placed a hand against your arm. His fingers found your hand, interlaced themselves with yours. "Want to come with me?"

All the urgency was gone when he pulled you to your feet and invited you into his life, and there really wasn't anything else to say but Yes, damned be the No and the Maybe

Crane let go of your hand, grabbed his shirt, and pulled it back over his head. Then he turned away from you, cleared his throat, adjusted his trousers and made for the door.

Troy and Savvy were not what you'd imagined. Then again you didn't really know what you'd expected. Not the scarred face on Troy, for certain, or the youthful Savvy with his jacket so tight you thought it'd pop any moment.

Crane introduced you to their smiling faces, which showed none of the wariness you'd come to assume from the people of the Quarantine. They didn't berate you that you'd tried to kill their friend either, but then again you guessed he'd left that detail out.

Then Crane and Troy wandered off, and you stood fidgeting nervously while Savvy showed you all the electronic gadgets he'd collected in the pit he called his base of operations. Like it was some genius contraption. And it probably was, considering the general state of Harran after the outbreak.

He'd just started boasting about some sort of transmission booster he'd fixed up which had saved all of Harran (your eyebrows knitted skeptically at that claim), when Crane and Troy wandered back into sight. He looked quite grim. She just looked all business and no play.

Crane stopped by your side. He dropped a heavy hand your shoulder. Squeezed.

"Look after her for me?" The question was directed at Troy, whose stern features softened with a knowing little smile. You knew you were likely turning all shades of pink, but there wasn't a damn thing you could do to stop the heat from creeping up your neck.

"You've got it, Crane. Good luck," she reassured him and just like that he was off.

The first thing you learned about the man who'd killed Owen that evening, was that his first name was Kyle. It had never come up. Next you heard about the Ministry of Defence having wanted to wipe Harran off the map. And how he'd used Savvy's genius piece of tech to stop that. Him. Crane. Kyle. That man you'd tried to kill.

You'd almost choked on a piece of pickled carrot at that point, and had started blatantly gaping between Troy and Savvy as they kept talking.

They told you that he'd come here from the slums, chasing after documents meant to help create a cure for the virus. A what? A cure? Seriously? They ought to have been joking. They told you about Rais, what the lunatic had done to him. What Crane had done to Rais, who now lay dead at the bottom of his skyscraper since two days past

They also told you about how Crane had a chance to get out. And chose not to. Just like that the anger made sense. And just like that you wanted nothing more than to have them stop talking, because you realised just what you'd done. Or tried to do, and failed.

You felt sick.

You'd tried to kill a hero.

"I'm tired," you lied to Troy and Savvy then and you didn't like the look Troy gave you. The one that said she read a little too much between the lines, or between your panicked little glances.

She showed you across the construction platform connecting the twin minaret towers and into the unfinished one with half its top still missing. Your stomach flipped uncomfortably and you felt miserable as you decided the universe had decided to wag its finger at you and chide you for the shit you'd tried to pull. The memory dancing between your ears, of you having a gun pointed at Crane, ready to shoot him dead, felt so vivid you feared you were projecting it out into the open for everyone to see. For Troy to see in particular, who stayed with you as she helped you set up. She watched you with attentive, dark eyes, but she was still smiling at least, as if everything was perfectly fine.

It wasn't though. She wished you a good night and left you to your thoughts. There were way too many of those, you decided. You slipped out of your shirt and trousers and curled into a miserable little ball inside the bedroll thrown atop a thick mattress.

By the time you'd fallen asleep, you'd convinced yourself that you were a monster.

You bolted down the hallway, the avalanche right behind you. It tumbled over itself, hooves and paws and airplanes and the titter of someone you'd long forgotten. A something got your legs and you fell, diving right into the snow. Your cheeks burnt with the cold and your nose stung with pain.

Your eyes snapped open. The cold floor was pressing against your cheeks and your nose smarted. Warmth cupped around your shoulder, and then around your torso, and you were lifted backwards into a well of heat.

Sluggish as they were, it took your thoughts a moment to catch up with the whole business of being awake, and to realise you'd fallen off the mattress. Or had been pushed off it, entirely by accident you guessed, considering the quiet mutter of "Sorry—Sorry—" whispering against your ear.

You wiggled inside the confines of the arms wrapped around you, until you managed to turn yourself onto your back and look up at Crane's silhouette hovering in the dark by your side. You couldn't see a damn thing.

"You're a sheet hogger," his shadow told you. Grinning.

You weren't. Were you? And why was he grinning, he ought to have been pissed at you after what you'd done.

An uncomfortable lump formed in your throat. No way. You weren't about to start crying. Not here. Not in front of him. You sniffed, clenched your jaw and tried to sink into the mattress, out of sight and out of existence.

"Hey— what's wrong?" The grin was gone, and now his shadow was all concern and worry. It came closer too, a shoulder towering right above you and an arm somewhere over your head.

"I'm sorry," you blurted. "For trying to kill you. I had no idea."

The shadow froze. Held his breath. "No idea about what?"

You tried to find his eyes up there somewhere, found the faint glint of them above you and tried to hold them through the otherwise perfect darkness.

"That you… that you were one of the good guys." 'Oh wow—', you thought. "I mean, the thing with Rais. And the Ministry. I had no idea," you added quickly, as if that made it any better.

Crane's shadow twitched above you. He exhaled sharply, his warm breath tickling against your forehead.

It took you a moment to realise he was chuckling.

"Huh." He sounded awfully amused. "In that case you're all forgiven."

The words didn't make any sense to you. He couldn't just go and do that, could he? Forget what you'd done, forgive you just like that? You wanted to tell him he was being stupid for not understanding the gravity of the situation, but then gravity stopped making much sense too, because suddenly your down was up and your up was down and you'd been pulled atop of him.

There were hands on your hip. Then there were hands on your rump. And a moment later one of them hooked itself into your right knee and guided you to lay snugly against his leg. All the guilt and misery that had been kicking around in your head exited the stage. They fled the sensation of his skin on yours, dove for cover when he coaxed your cheek to rest against his chest and folded you up in his arms. The coarse shadow of hair tickled your nose and your lips. His heart drummed against your ear. You remembered the rhythm. The tha-thump-tha-thump-thump. A little slower than the night you'd fallen , but not by much. Still very much worked up.

And very much alive.

You raised your hands, wrapped them around him. Held on tight.

"Sooo- where were we?" He asked as he rolled his hip to make himself more comfortable. Your thoughts caught themselves on the feel of the only piece of clothing he still wore. You bit back a grin. Was it red hearts on white today, too? Like back then, that first night when you'd met him, when all you'd known about him was that he'd killed Owen and went by the name of Crane?

Maybe you should try find out.

Yes. Definitely. You really ought to.

Taffer Notes: And here we are. I hope you decided the ride and the show and the tumble and whatnot, and that my attempt at wrapping this up emotionally rather than physically wasn't all too disappointing. Besides, how am I supposed to know how and if you decide to figure out if Crane's wearing his heart boxers again?!